1. Technical Field
Embodiments of the present disclosure generally relate to a vehicle management system and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for efficient scheduling for multiple automated non-holonomic vehicles using a coordinated path planner.
2. Description of the Related Art
Automated Vehicles (AVs) operate in mixed-use, multivehicle, dynamic warehouse environments. The nature of this environment can cause automated vehicles to become impeded by unknown obstacles or situations as they go about the execution of tasks. This delay causes any a priori planning to become obsolete as the interaction of automated vehicles may cause deadlocks, and time critical tasks become at risk for completion. Factors including overall driving time, vehicle constraints such as non-holonomic motion and fuel usage also impact planning. These problems have motivated the development and implementation of the presented scheduling solution using coordinated paths for multiple vehicles.
Although research into multi-vehicle path planning is not a new topic, for example, a coordinated approached is used in constraining robots to defined roadmaps resulting in a complete and relatively fast solution, a near-optimal multi-vehicle approach for non-holonomic vehicles focuses on continuous curve paths that avoid moving obstacles and are collision free is not available. Even though these solutions are useful, the problem consideration is not broad enough to be used directly within the targeted industrial environment. There may be requirements to have high utilization of resources and throughput of product. Current approaches used to solve the planning and scheduling problem, particularly with multiple vehicles have often been too limited in scope to address and attempt to optimize solutions.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a method and apparatus for efficient scheduling of multiple non-holonomic automated vehicles using coordinated path planning.